System Integration and Control Technologies Overview. Electrical integration technologies are a central element in the Chameleon Suit concept, which inherently requires active sensing and control devices distributed over the surface of the suit. Study concepts entailing heat pumping and oxygen recovery functions, increase the integration challenge by increasing the number of signals which must potentially be transferred to support system operation and by significantly increasing the amount of power that must be transferred, stored, and managed. Emerging technologies for smart garments and conductive textiles have been reviewed against these growing needs. Some noteworthy design considerations guiding this effort include: • Critical systems will require redundancy/multiple path implementation • Traditional methods of cabling/buses/connectors are cumbersome, weighty and have poor reliability. The technology base that best fits the Chameleon Suit’s needs for garment integration and flexibility as well as redundancy and reliability in a high flexure personal garment is the development of fabrics that integrate conductors and active components, either in the form of interwoven metallics and embedded microcomponents, or conductive polymer structures. Based on the available data, both will easily be capable of meeting the modest data transfer needs for the Chameleon Suit. Conductive polymer technologies currently appear more amenable to the cost-effective manufacture of the complex multi-layer signal and power transfer geometries we will require. However, the limited conductivity presently afforded by conductive polymer materials makes them unattractive for power transport at the relatively high power levels required for heat pumping and oxygen recovery processes. Five broad areas of requirements for the Chameleon suit which have been addressed in our integration and control technology investigation are: • Integration Architecture: Consideration of the interactions of the Chameleon Suit with its wearer and its environment leads to the conclusion that its design must include a large number of independently controlled zones in the pressure suit for many of the system functions. Maintaining thermal comfort through varying activity levels, thermal environments, and orientations with respect to incident sunlight and proximate hot surfaces, for example, was shown analytically to require approximately 150 separate regions within which suit wall heat transport could be independently varied. Much of the control of each zone ...
